Clipboard Is Digital Scrapbooking for Your Life

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Clipboard Is Digital Scrapbooking for Your Life

Between Pinterest, Evernote, Dropbox, and Basecamp you might think that all our social-bookmarking, note-saving, and collaboration prayers have been answered. Clipboard, a 5-month-old bookmarking tool, is making the argument that they haven't. The company, founded by Microsoft veteran Gary Flake, is fusing some of the most useful things about Evernote, Pinterest, and Basecamp with additional features of its own, in an attempt to create the only collaborative content-saving tool you'll ever need.

When Clipboard launched in May 2012, it served as an online space to save important information gleaned from the web and share it with other people. Now, the company is playing up the idea of collaboration by introducing shared boards, digital cubbies filled with images, text, video, whatever can be served up by the web, where groups of people can create, edit, and delete the digital items. Each board can have a theme, like "places to eat during next month's business conference," or "research for a new website design," and members of the board can add clips that match the topic.

Boards can have four types of members: an owner, administrators, writers, and readers. Owners and administrators have control over who can contribute to a board, writers can add content, and readers can simply view the clips. Owners and admins can also tweak the privacy of a board, hiding it from anyone who isn't a member, or making it visible to any Clipboard user.

Clipboard's bread and butter is the clipping tool, which grabs a snapshot of a website to save for later. It could be an article you want to read over the weekend, a recipe you don't want to lose, a YouTube clip for your cat video collection, or a slideshow on social media market strategies you'd like to use at your next office meeting. What makes the clipper unique is that it can save full videos, photos, and even Flash content. That means without leaving Clipboard's website you can play back YouTube videos, go through a slideshow, and play Flash-based games. By adding a hashtag to a clip, it creates a board to organize clips based on theme or topic.

Clipboard CEO Gary Flake knows that Pinterest has become the place to find and share an artsy inspirational quote, a photo of a white-sand beach in BoraBora, or some drool-worthy dessert picture, but he believes it's utility ends there. “You are not going to plan a vacation using Pinterest,” he says. That's because most of the information you would need to visit that beautiful beach, like travel guides or hotel reservations, is buried on a website outside Pinterest, instead of saved within the social network. Since Pinterest can only "pin" images to its site, it would be difficult for most people to save a travel itinerary, or anything else that's text-based, even if they tried.

On the other end of the spectrum, services like Evernote and Dropbox are useful for storing notes and files, but that information often stays stuck in private notebooks and folders. It's not hard share content in Evernote, a four-year-old web content clipping and note taking service, but most of its 34 million users tend to keep their notes private. Dropbox users share and collaborate often, but the company only caters to files – not pieces of content you find online.

The whole point of all these services is at some level to connect friends, spouses, or co-workers, so they can work together toward a common goal - might be a wedding or a marketing campaign. It's in the latter category where Clipboard thinks it can turn its nascent service into a money-making business. For now Clipboard is a free service, but Flake has plans for a pro version aimed at larger teams who want to work together. “If you want a certain number of boards or number of people added you will pay,” says Flake. “We will make pro-plans available for corporate users.” Non-commercial users can still add lots of users and boards (like a research group at a university).

Clipboard might be yet another content-saving tool, but if it plays its collaborative cards right, it might successfully marry what we love to do in our spare time (browse Pinterest) and what we have to do Monday through Friday (work together on projects).